The Capital
Quarter of pleasures where the rich are always waiting, Waiting expensively for miracles to happen, Dim-lighted restaurant where lovers eat each other, Cafe where exiles have established a malicious village:
You with your charm and your apparatus have abolished The strictness of winter and the spring's compulsion; Far from your lights the outraged punitive father, The dullness of mere obedience here is apparent.
So with orchestras and glances, soon you betray us To belief in our infinite powers; and the innocent Unobservant offender falls in a moment Victim to his heart's invisible furies.
In unlighted streets you hide away the appalling; Factories where lives are made for a temporary use Like collars or chairs, rooms where the lonely are battered Slowly like pebbles into fortuitous shapes.
But the sky you illumine, your glow is visible far Into the dark countryside, enormous and frozen, Where, hinting at the forbidden like a wicked uncle, Night after night to the farmer's children you beckon.
W.H. Auden, December 1938
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